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Posts Tagged ‘open source’

Have you ever built a website, or considered building a website using Joomla! ?

Seeing as how I have become a WordPress butt boy and have built a couple of hundred or more sites using WordPress I normally do not look outside my little WP box for other possibilities.

My website publishing started close to a dozen years ago and up until a little over a year ago I gave all my talent away for free.  The first site I created was on freewebs.com and it was about genealogy.  One does not have to be a genius to fill in the boxes that freewebs gives you and then hit “publish.”

About seven or eight years ago I took my now famous genealogy site and hired a professional web design company to convert it over to a full blown very impressive looking site with tons of interactive features and they used Joomla! That was the first I had ever heard of that website design system.

The code looked like a plate of rotten spaghetti to me and there was no way I would EVER learn any of that crud.  I am NOT  a programmer. Well the company that built my site did take me by the hand and teach me how to make minor changes and how to add content and all of the day to day necessities of running a popular website.

It still was confusing and I had to call on them to pull me out of the ditch several times.  Then a little over a year ago I was introduced to WordPress and have learned just enough now to be dangerous.  I can build a Blog site or even a static website using WP in no time at all.  They are excellent sites too I might add.

That said, there are times that I think one might want to consider using Joomla! To build a site that requires some heavy duty data base activity, inventory control, point of sale, etc.  Sure there is probably a WordPress plugin for some of these features but maybe Joomla! would be a better choice.

So I went to http://Joomla.org and started to look around to see what they had to offer.  This is a pretty impressive system and they have an enormous following.  The forum has 1,503,625 posts, 331,882 topics, and 249,947 members as of this morning.

Some of the topics and categories on the Joomla! forum are:
Installation
Migrating and Upgrading
Security
Administration
Extensions
Templates
SEO
Language
Performance
And many, many more…

From the website under What is Joomla?
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Then there is a good description of Content Management Systems (CMS)
Some examples of what Joomla! can do.
Who uses Joomla?
And again, many more…

It appears as though as with all Open Source programs, there is a hoard of engineers, programmers, designers and users that stand ready to lend a hand to anyone that wants to give it a go.

I think I will set up a test site and just start learning this myself.  It can’t hurt and just might come in handy with the bigger clients that I have been having sign up for my website development services.

Besides, I still have my friends that built my original Joomla! site that I do J-V projects with quite often, and if my ox gets stuck in the ditch, I’m sure they’ll be there to pull me out.